Re: "be'be'" - double negation

At 18:34 2002-04-07 +0000, willm@cstone.net wrote:
>In some languages (and English slang dialects) the "double negative" in "I
>ain't never goin' there again," is an emphatic, rather than a logical
>reversal of one negative by the other. [...] So far as we know, Klingon
>always adhere's to the logical string of negatives reversing each other
>rather than emphasizing each other.
That inference seems specious.
I hasten to point out that modern standard English is quite rare among
humanoid languages in having this "logical reversal" rule -- in fact, it's
not even all that common among forms of English. (Cf., for example, "He
never yet no villainy ne said / In all his life, unto no manner wight", a
few dozen lines into the prologue of /Canterbury Tales/.)
To the contrary, most languages are like this:
* If you have a "negative word" in the clause, you /have/ to put a negation
on the verb. Cf. French "Rien _n_'est la`." (Nothing is not there.)
* Or: without necessarily negating the verb, you get to use any number of
"negative words", without entertaining this weird idea of them "cancelling
out". If Klingon works this way, it could lead to sentences like this:
Officer: 'av! DaHjaj yotlhDaq 'Iv Dalegh?
guard! today field-LOC who you.him-see?
(who do you see in the field today?)
Guard: pa' wej pagh vIlegh!
there not.yet none I.him-see!
I haven't seen anyone[/thing] there yet.
Officer: wa'Hu' je?
And yesterday?
Guard: pa' not pagh vIlegh!
there never none I.him-see!
I haven't ever seen anyone[/thing] there.
In languages where you can have several negative words, you /can/ sometimes
say "I saw no-one some-time" and get the same meaning as "I saw no-one
no-time" (I never saw anyone), but it's my impression that the latter is
typically more frequent. But a greatly complicating factor is whether the
language in question has generally serviceable words for "some-time",
"some-place", "some-one", etc. -- i.e., "non-negative" versions of the
negative words.
Since Okrand and any even passably competent Federation linguist or
polyglot would be aware that modern standard English's notion of "negatives
cancelling" is a bizarre exception in humanoid languages, his apparent
silence on this point in TKD should reasonably be taken as implicating that
Klingon is nomal in being unlike English on this point.
That leaves open the question of whether Klingon requires (or even allows)
negative words to negate the verb. So note:
TKW p.201:
Dal pagh jagh. [No enemy is boring.]
(not: *{Dalbe' pagh jagh})
Similarly:
TKW p.80: "not lay'Ha' tlhIngan." (and not *{not lay'Ha'be' tlhIngan.})
TKW p.46: "not toj tlhInganpu'" (and not *{not tojbe' tlhInganpu'})
(Altho that doesn't specify whether you /can/ say *{Dalbe' pagh jagh} and
get the meaning "No enemy is boring".)
Voragh qatlhob! What does the canon corpus show on these points?
--
Sean M. Burke http://www.spinn.net/~sburke/

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